


lay your weapons down

by interestinggin



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Veterans, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-10
Updated: 2014-04-10
Packaged: 2018-01-18 21:10:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1443019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/interestinggin/pseuds/interestinggin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A study of a friendship that will outlast the stars, and two people who ought to know much better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lay your weapons down

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt at the Valentine's Multifandom Friendship Ficfest.

_'You think she'll hold together?'  
'She's tore up plenty, but she'll fly true.'  
'Could be bumpy.'  
'Always is.'_

 

Malcolm Reynolds is not a warrior, not yet. He is an angry young man; a man with a fire where his heart should be and a need to taste blood on his tongue, a ranch owner with a farm he’s never loved that he is determined to keep, a rebel with a cause who never needed one to let out all this rage against a system that he despises. But he is not a warrior, not yet. So the first time a man falls dead next to him with half his head missing, he turns white, gags, and falls to the floor.  
  
Zoe Alleyne was born a soldier. She has bullets for eyes and a grenade for a heart, but the pin stays firmly in. She never explodes. She follows her orders to the letter and never asks why, and all the blood and screams and tears do not even register except as distractions. Distractions from her work. Her life. So when she sees a new recruit collapsing on duty, her immediate reaction is exasperation, and she has the sense to take out the woman who shot her man with one refined bullet through the skull before crouching down beside him.  
  
“Easy, Reynolds,” she says, as calmly as she can in the circumstances, “breath deep, now.”  
  
Mal swallows and presses both hands to his eyes. “He ain’t got - oh,  _tzao-gao_ , he ain’t got -”  
  
“No,” she says, “he ain’t. Give him a look. Look at him.”  
  
She watches him grab the cross around his neck, press it to his lips and murmur a frantic prayer, and she quells the urge to snort. Everyone’s got their methods, and Zoe has already seen this war destroy too many people’s hopes to wish it on another boy.  
  
“Just give him a look,” she says again, and Mal, still shaking, does. “He ain’t gonna be getting up again, sweetheart. So wish him your best and move on and might be, if we’re lucky, we can avenge him.”  
  
“Oh, sweet Christ,” says Mal, and then he looks appalled with himself. Zoe punches him on the arm.  
  
“Don’t beat yourself up; the enemy are gonna do that for you more than enough. Are you with me or aren’t you?” she hisses. Something in her is tingling; a sense that perhaps isn’t quite human, is something more, and something she hears or maybe smells tells her to stick an arm round the corner, follow it with her head, and shoot dead the guy who’s creeping up on them, who falls fast. She darts back round to see Mal closing the boy’s arms and muttering a prayer.  
  
“Are you with me, Reynolds?” she asks again, more firmly.  
  
He nods. His face is dark as he picks up his gun again. “To death and beyond.”  
  
“Well,” she says grimly, “I’m getting my hair done at six, so let’s try and avoid it if possible.”

 

  
“Sergeant,” Zoe asks, cradling a boy - yet another boy, and there are so many of them, too young for the war and she can’t turn them in because she _knows_  how it feels to want to be able to do  _something_  - in her arms as Mal holds his hands down over the wounds, “what are your orders?”  
  
Mal takes a breath in, because he’s learnt over the months; learnt more quickly than he should have had to, and he presses down more tightly with one hand and rips a bandage pack open with his teeth with the other.  
  
They’re losing, but what else is new?  
  
They’re always losing, because they started fighting when they’d already lost.  
  
He meets her eyes as their hands work together to stem the bleeding and tie it up, and absently Mal presses one hand to the boy’s forehead as he passes out from the pain. He’ll survive. “We retreat,” he says firmly. “This patch of  _go-se_  ain’t worth more of us dying for. It’s gone.”  
  
“Sir,” she says, “we’ve been tasked with holding it.”  
  
“Yeah. But I got a feelin’ that our orders might have changed. I just get these feelings sometimes.”  
  
“And without command even having to let you know, as well,” says Zoe wryly.  
  
“Impressive, ain’t it?”  
  
Zoe doesn’t smile, because that isn’t what Zoe does. But she nods. A smirk is tugging at her lips despite it all.  
  
“Surely is, sir. Surely is.”  
  


 

  
Neither Zoe or Mal smoke. Zoe needs her lungs for breathing, and Mal threw up the times he tried. But most nights, when they make camp in the forests, the pair of them go out ‘on a smoke’ and squat in the darkness outside the tents, far enough away to not be heard, and sit in absolute silence. Mal leans his head on her shoulder.  
  
“Pretty soon,” she hears him say in a whisper her keen ears pick up without trying, “there ain’t gonna be a scrap of earth in this sky they don’t own.”  
  
“Not if we fight,” says Zoe, and she knows he’s aware she has long ceased to believe a word of it.  
  
“No,” says Mal, taking a swig from his hipflask and passing it to her. “Guess not.”  
  
Minutes pass, and so does the morbidity, passing over them like the night air itself. A shooting star flies across their vision - or perhaps it is a ship - neither of them can be sure. Either way, Zoe watches Mal close his eyes tight and make a wish.  
  
“Ain’t nobody can own the stars, sir,” Zoe says, without ever being sure why.  
  
Mal looks at her in surprise. Then he throws back his head and roars with delight.  
  
“Shut up, Sergeant, you‘ll get us both shot,” hisses Zoe, suppressing a chuckle of her own. She swats him on the arm. Mal sobers up as best he can.  
  
“Yeah,” he says unconvincingly, the grin still on his lips.  
  
He stands up, and gestures to her to follow him. Swift as shadows they flit through  the trees, unseen and unheard, the bracken cracking under their feet until they reach the crest of a hill that just breaks through the crown of the forest. Mal grins wickedly and punches the sky like he’s trying to knock it out.  
  
“You can’t own this, you thieving sons of bitches!” he yells, and every instinct in Zoe’s body makes her tackle him to the ground and throw herself on top of his back. He laughs again, loud and pure. “Get off, Corporal!”  
  
“You looking to get yourself killed, sir, or have you just gone loco?” she asks in his ear, still holding him down.  
  
“Little of the former, lot of the latter, and a whole heap of fuck-you.” He pushes back suddenly and manages to pull himself to standing. Zoe, somehow, stays with her arms firmly round his neck and tries to push him down, so he casually picks up both her legs and holds her in a piggy-back.  
  
“Sir,” Zoe yelps, and then, slightly more panicked, “Mal, you bucket of chou-ma-nio, put me down!”  
  
“Corporal,” he says with delight, grabbing at her legs to wrap them round his waist more tightly so he doesn’t drop her, “you are  _significantly_  more likeable when you’re cussin’. You kiss your mother with that mouth?”  
  
“I ain’t gonna cuss you, Sarge, but I might just have to  _kill_  you,” she grinds out between her teeth, as he happily near-skips around the hilltop with her clinging to his back.  
  
“Come on, Zoe,” he says, and then he leans back as much as he can and howls at the sky. “You ain’t gonna take this, boys!” Mal screams.  
  
Zoe spits on the floor over his shoulder, digs her knees in to climb further up his back, and sticks her own arms high in the air in fists. “You can’t have it!” she yells, and she can feel Mal‘s sides shaking from laughter and exhaustion and delight beneath her. “You can’t have the whole damn ‘verse!”  
  
“You ain’t gonna take it!” he echoes, their laughter ringing round the hilltop and the sky itself until they are utterly, utterly spent, and their point, Zoe feels, has been more than adequately made.  
  


  
  
“So, Zoe,” yells Mal as they both duck to avoid an incoming missile, “I’ve been making plans.”  
  
It explodes behind them and takes out what Zoe is very relieved was not a load-bearing wall. “Little busy right now, sir,” she shouts back, raising her gun.  
  
“Reckon after all of this, the whole squadron’s gonna go get a ranch and bring it to order.”  
  
“Oh, yeah,” she says, rolling her eyes and letting off six rounds without blinking, “I can just see Burgher with his hand up a cow’s-”  
  
“It’ll be rustic and quaint,” he interrupts, and shoots an advancing soldier in the leg. “You like quaint.”  
  
“Sir,” says Zoe, so bewildered that she almost stops  _fighting_  to look at him in disbelief, “exactly which part of my warm and welcoming demeanour gave the impression I liked  _quaint_?”  
  
“Everyone likes quaint, Corporal.” Mal pauses to crouch to roll over to the other side of her to take out someone trying to creep up on them, and continues. “Even the Alliance like quaint. Why else would they be this determined to get their hands on it? No, we’ll get a nice little ranch someplace. Maybe Three Hills or Aphrodite. Somewhere where there ain’t no more noise. Boys’ll love it.”  
  
“You paint a damn pretty picture, Sergeant,” says Zoe.  
  
“Well,” says Mal, ducking down to reload, “my momma said I was a born artist.”  
  


  
  
The day they bomb Shadow is when Zoe sees the real Malcolm Reynolds disappear. The news comes over the radio; their own officers don’t want them to hear the Alliance propoganda that’s been issued, so all they get to hear is  _‘Browncoat planet Shadow destroyed. Alert personnel with connections. No survivors. Strikeback at 0600 hours_.’ Neither of them were talking, but suddenly there is a silence in the tent that has nothing to do with an absence of noise.  
  
Zoe looks at Mal, sat in the tent, staring ahead.  
  
His face is entirely still.  
  
He is barely 24 years old.  
  
“Corporal Alleyne,” he says, in a voice that sounds so hoarse he might never have used it at all, “if you could go and alert the rest of the men that we’ll be moving at sun-up, that’d be just swell.”  
  
Zoe nods, salutes, and leaves the tent.  
  
A few of the men have relatives on Shadow, as it turns out - only one other, like Mal, had his whole family there, and he bursts into tears. Zoe leaves him in the arms of his comrades, who are, after all, used to this.  
  
She finds Mal still sat on the floor, lit only by the lamp, still looking into a world she cannot and does not want to see. Slowly, she eases down next to him.  
  
“Breathe through it, Sergeant,” she says, softly. “That’s what you always tell them.”  
  
“ _Fuck,_ ” says Mal. He doesn’t often swear in English; it’s just not considered good behaviour in a well-brought up young man, but if it’s ever going to be appropriate Zoe supposes it’s now.  
  
Zoe holds her breath. She’s not good with this. She’s never been good with this. So she sits a good half-foot away, in case he needs his space, and keeps her hands on her knees.  
  
“Jesus Christ,” he says again, before wincing automatically, the crucifix around his neck cutting into his hand because he's gripping it so tightly.  
  
“Mal,” Zoe tries, “I think the Lord’ll forgive you a little cursin’ at a time like this.”  
  
“Don’t damn care if he does,” Mal snarls, “bastard damn bastard.”  
  
“You don’t mean that,” says Zoe.  
  
Mal presses the base of his palms into his eye sockets. “No, I don’t,” he groans, and then, more loudly, “ _oh, hell_ , my mother, Zoe. All the boys. Our shepherd. Everyone.”  
  
Zoe doesn’t tell him she knows, because she doesn’t. But she does let him lean his head on her shoulder, and lightly stroke the back of his hand.  
  
“Might be about to cry,” says Mal. She can hear it building in his throat; a lump, a hitch in his breath that threatens to break.  
  
“Not sure I can handle that, sir. You know I’m a sensitive type.”  
  
Mal laughs, and the laugh catches and turns into a slight sob. He holds it back as much as he can, but he can’t quite manage it. He lets out a cry that must be echoing so far that even the Alliance can hear it. Zoe holds his hand and lets him cry out all the loss one man can feel into her shoulder; he is crying for a family, and a planet, and the whole damn stupid verse as well.  
  
When he is done, he lifts his head, and his tearstained cheek touches her nose.  
  
“Thank you, Corporal,” he says weakly.  
  
“’S all shiny, Sarge,” says Zoe, patting his hand. “Get some rest, if you can. Don’t want you dying tomorrow.”  
  
“God forbid,” says Mal, with a crooked and humourless smile, pushing down all the grief inside him. “Dismissed.”  
  
In that moment, he becomes a warrior. And Zoe understands him at last.  
  


  
  
God has gone from Mal’s life; left him broken and howling at the world that doesn’t have rhyme nor reason any more. Serenity is not where it ends, not really; for those of them who will not lay down arms, there are still battles to fight and wounds to obtain. In the mud, there is a peace that they are learning to make with defeat, for it is coming, sure as night that follows the day.  
  
Day three after the end, after Serenity, and Mal points out that there’s a place where night and day are strangers both.  
  
Zoe can get behind that.  
  


  
  
“Ain’t exactly a ranch,” says Zoe, standing with her hands on her hips, looking disapprovingly at Mal as he swings round in the pilot’s chair. He chuckles, using his hands to brace against the bridge and swing round once more.  
  
“Ain’t exactly the whole platoon,” he shrugs, “but it’ll do us, won’t it?”  
  
“More than that.” For a moment, a mad beautiful moment, Zoe wants to wrap her arms around his neck and embrace him as a child or brother or officer, as his fingers linger where he scratches his neck, where Christ used to be. But she doesn’t. “Mighty big sky out there,” she offers instead.  
  
He offers her a warm, lazy, mad grin.  
  
“Far too big for two,” he returns. “Let’s find us a crew, Zoe.”  
  
In the times they call night, when they are soaring, she wanders the empty corridors with a gun slung casually in her holster, practicing the stealth that comes naturally, just in case. There are far too many nightmares waiting in her bunk.  
  
He takes almost immediately to sleeping on the bridge, tucked casually under a blanket, and complaining all day long of a bad neck. This evening, or day, or forever, she is barefoot and silent when she reaches what she thinks of as the gateway to the sky, and she does her best not to wake him.  
  
He looks peaceful, when he is asleep. He looks like a child again.  
  
Zoe strokes a piece of railing and feels it hum beneath her. Out here in the black there is silence, and stillness, and a quiet that there never was in war, even in the moments when the guns were dead - but despite all that she had been led to believe, it feels like there is life too, burning beneath her feet in the very heart of this ship.  
  
“Serenity,” she murmurs, smiling. “Well, now. Hey, darlin’. Isn’t that a pretty name?”  
  
“It was either that or Zoe,” says Mal groggily, coming to, “and I thought you might take offence.”  
  
“At being compared to this lump of  _luh-suh_? Perish the thought.”  
  
“Zoe,” Mal frowns, “I’ll thank you not to talk like that in front of the girl I love.”  
  
“Sorry, sir,” she says. She adds the title on autopilot, and by now, neither of them notice. “Is that comparison a comment about the size of my behind, sir?”  
  
“Didn’t even know you had one,” says Mal. She smirks. In the light of the console, he almost looks honest.  
  
Almost.  
  


  
  
They never row in front of the crew. Old habits die hard in a soldier, and harsh words are the quickest thing to undermine command. Zoe, in any case, has perfected the art of the disbelieving ‘sir?’ more cuttingly than Mal could ever have imagined.  
  
It’s in front of the new pilot that Zoe finally loses her temper.  
  
It is  _because_  of the new pilot that Zoe finally loses her temper.  
  
“Goddamnit,” Mal snarls, “I ain’t havin’ this discussion again, Zoe. This is finite. We are going to Whitefall and we are gonna sell them to Patience, who I will remind you is a highly respected landowner-”  
  
“- and a damn hellcat, sir, which is why I’m voicing my concerns,” Zoe says, trying against every fibre in her body not to raise her voice, following Mal along the dormitory corridor and up to the bridge.  
  
“Your concerns are noted and suitably ignored, because one of us here is the captain of  _my_  ship.” That riles her. She’s not his. She’s theirs. Their ship. Their girl. Their Serenity. Just because his false name is the one on the papers, doesn’t mean it gives him any more of a right to claim her. “Wash,” he says, clapping the other man on the shoulder, “is there a reason we appear to be heading in a very much Not-Whitefall direction?”  
  
Wash wrinkles his nose and looks at them both, a little awkward. “Uh,” he says.  
  
“Back where I told you to go, if you can manage that,” Mal says, a commanding note in his voice.  
  
“We ain’t going to Whitefall,” says Zoe, firmly. “We’re going to Osiris. Hold course.”  
  
Wash pauses with his hand on a control, and shoots Mal a look.  
  
“We are  _not_  going to Osiris,” Mal hisses, “because I don’t have even the slightest desire to go flying into another Alliance patrol when we’re getting rid of stolen goods, and also, this is as previously mentioned  _my damn boat_.”  
  
“And I don’t want to see you shot, sir,” snaps Zoe.  
  
" _Run-tse duh fwotzoo_ , would it be too much to ask for the domestic to happen off my bridge, or do you need a captive audience?” asks Wash, throwing his hands in the air, but neither of them hear him.  
  
“Seen plenty of people shot before, Zoe, and exactly what makes you think I can’t take care of myself?”  
  
“Well, unless you’ve suddenly learnt to shoot in a straight line, Mal-”  
  
“Don’t you _dare_  talk to me like that in front of my men!” Mal roars.  
  
“They ain’t gonna be your men much longer, ‘cause you’re fixin’ to get them killed!”  
  
“Hey!” says Wash, standing up and putting a firm hand on both of their chests. He looks straight ahead, avoiding both the glares that could easily send him flying through the reinforced hull with their force. “Hey,” he says again, a little softer. “I’m not - I’m not your men, guys.”  
  
Zoe blinks. “What the hell?” she whispers.  
  
“I get it,” says Wash, shrugging, and then as Mal rounds on him, he throws up his hand. “Okay, right, well, I don’t get it. This veteran thing. But you ain’t still there, sir and ma’am. This is peacetime, okay? This is civilian territory. War’s over and done, and you need to move on.”  
  
Mal looks like he’s about to punch their new and brilliant pilot in his awkward, beaming and moustached face.  
  
He doesn’t get a chance to, because Zoe does it first. Wash curses, clutches at his nose, and runs off to the infirmary. Mal says nothing, but he gives her a raise, the next time they get paid.  
  
(Which admittedly isn’t for about three months.)  
  


  
  
Eight months later, Zoe marries the man she loves on the ship that‘s hers as well, and Mal, biting his tongue, does the deed. She smiles as Wash brushes a strand of hair from her face, and strokes a finger along her nose; whispers vows that they have written directly in her ear and makes her face light up with joy.  
  
Later, after their wedding night, after Wash has fallen asleep with his arm draped close around her, she slips on a robe and walks the corridors again.  
  
Mal’s back in the chair that will always, a little, be his.  
  
“He doesn’t know anything about it,” he says, not turning to look at her as she leans on the back of it. “About any of it.”  
  
“I know,” she says, smiling. “That’s why I married him.”  
  
“Love him?” Mal asks briskly, flicking a switch that didn’t need flicking. His voice is carefully level, and gives nothing away. He must have learnt that from her.  
  
She reaches out a hand to stroke his hair, and something stops her. Something that will always stop her.  
  
Old war wounds never heal.  
  
“Enough,” she says softly.  
  
“Guess I don’t have to say if he hurts you I’ll destroy him.”  
  
Zoe laughs then, out loud, rich and deep and pure. He grins, tilts his head back and rolls his eyes at her. “I know, I know,” he adds, “you’ll have killed him long before I get there.”  
  
“Every time, sir,” says Zoe, a soldier to the end. “That is my job.”  
  
“And you do it with such a professional detachment.”  
  
She shrugs. “I like it when things go boom.”  
  
“You’re a psychopath, Corporal.”  
  
“Oh, that I am, sir, that I surely am.”

 

  
Zoe’s sat in the chair, this time. It smells like Wash, these days, and there are dinosaurs on the panel that make it hard for anyone but their own whizzkid to even find the controls. He’s asleep, his body long since given over to exhaustion after a chase and an adrenaline rush that would have killed a lesser man.  
  
Even Jayne likes him by now.  
  
“Everything present and correct, Zoe?” Mal asks, sticking his head through the door.  
  
“Shipshape, Captain,” she replies, watching the gauges rise and fall in steady motion. He smiles.  
  
“Don’t suppose I need to tell you what day it is,” he says, scratching the back of his head.  
  
Zoe shrugs. “And here I thought it was a coincidence the Alliance nearly killed us after that bar fight.”  
  
“Ah, there’s no foolin’ you, is there, soldier?” His face falls solemn, just for a moment. Just for a few seconds, behind the joker, behind the leader, there’s a soldier. And a scared, lost little private. And a child.  
  
And a boy who needs a girl to hold his hand.  
  
From his pants’ pocket, he pulls out a battered old hipflask, dulled now by the years and rough travel. She knows it as well as she knows the smell of gunsmoke and the feel of mud beneath her knees, or the vast green plains that are his eyes. It’s Unification Day, and that means there are rituals to observe.  
  
“To better days,” he says, tilting the flask up and taking a sip.  
  
“To worse,” she says, taking it from him. She swigs. “And to all the little broken boys, wherever they may be.”  
  
She passes it back to him, her long fingers brushing his, and Mal leans against the console, and stares out at the sky that’s theirs, that nobody can take or own or burn. A smile that might one day survive is dancing in the corners of his eyes.  
  
“When you can’t crawl,” he says, and his mind and words are somewhere only she knows. She nods in understanding, and carefully does not cry. Her hand covers his, and keeps it warm and safe.  
  
Mal smiles, tucks the flask back into his pocket, and the ship just keeps on flying.

  
  
 _'Could be bumpy.'  
'Always is.'_


End file.
